State of the art whole body MR screening systems often use a continuously moving patient support table during image data acquisition to collect images of an entire patient in an isocenter of an MRI scanner. Typical applications include screening for cancerous metastasis or MR angiographies with and without contrast media. However, continuous patient movement tends to generate a large amount of images that need be read and interpreted, typically through a labor intensive process, by a highly trained health care provider. Although there is dedicated software available to reduce the workload and shorten the reading time, such software is limited to research applications or specific clinical applications.
Known computer aided diagnostics (CAD) detect specific pathologies (e.g. metastatic tumors) to reduce reading time of a radiologist. However such pathology detection is typically performed as an image post-processing operation after a patient has stopped being scanned. A comprehensive and fully integrated system according to invention principles addresses the above deficiencies and lack of integration in existing whole body MR imaging and other applications.